Review by Juhea Kim: Talking to North Korea

Juhea Kim, (2020). Millennial dictator: Theories about North Korea, Times Literary Supplement, 21 February.

THE GREAT SUCCESSOR: The secret rise and rule of Kim Jong Un – Anna Fifield

SEE YOU AGAIN IN PYONGYANG: A journey into Kim Jong Un’s North Korea – Travis Jeppesen

TALKING TO NORTH KOREA: Ending the nuclear standoff – Glyn Ford

Since rising to power in 2011, Kim Jong-un has achieved the dubious honour of becoming the world’s most infamous dictator. What is it about him that so fascinates us? His pursuit of nuclear weapons cannot be the answer: India and Pakistan are both nuclear states, but neither is threatened with sanctions. The country’s dire human rights record can also provide only a partial explanation: many oppressive and undemocratic regimes continue to do business with the West. Yet, no one since perhaps Osama bin Laden has inspired such popular ideological loathing. In Kim, the West sees the living ghost of the fight against communism, the twisted principle of a form of sovereignty (juche) that favours isolation over the welfare of its citizens, and a mutual opprobrium directed back at it. And looming over these is perhaps Pyongyang’s most headline-grabbing sin of all: its distortion of truth and suppression of information.

This obsession with secrecy is evident in the way books on North Korea claim, with a sprightly fortitude, to debunk myths about the Hermit Kingdom. “I set out to hear about the reality outside the fake capital, in the places that the regime wouldn’t let me visit”, Anna Fifield says in the author’s notes to The Great Successor: The secret rise and rule of Kim Jong Un. Through exhaustive interviews and research, a riveting picture of a millennial dictator emerges. As a teenager, Kim is hidden away in Bern, Switzerland, where he grows up a mediocre student, obsessed with basketball. He writes in a school paper, “if I had my ideal world I would not allow weapons and atomic bombs anymore”. Aged twenty-seven, he succeeds his father as the supreme leader and quickly quashes outside speculation that he will flounder. He pulls off a successful hydrogen bomb test while posting a 4–5 per cent annual growth in GDP, quite a feat in North Korean terms. Money seeps into nouveau riche “Pyonghattan”, a place obsessed with Rolexes and Gucci, sanctions be damned. To ensure his authority, Kim executes his uncle and assassinates his half-brother, moves rewarded by obedience internally, and all but forgiven and forgotten externally, including by China and Donald Trump’s United States. In this sense his diplomatic strategy has been another success. Foreign witnesses say that he can be personable, humorous and self-deprecating about his weight – though, of course, mocking him in North Korea would be punishable by death. Certainly he is prone to sentimentality. Fifield reports on how a South Korean singer performed in a goodwill concert in Pyongyang and sang “Belated Regret” at a special request from Kim. She later found out that Kim’s mother had listened to that song on repeat when she was dying of cancer.

For all its fascinating details, this isn’t an especially vivid portrait of a human soul. Instead, it feels like a mosaic of events, facts and testimonials, intelligently arranged to arrive at a logical conclusion. One can almost visualize the author standing in front of a masterboard on the wall connecting the dots. For the most part, this pays off in an eminently readable narrative enlivened by moments of great insight and surprising levity.

Somewhat less remarkable is the conclusion itself, about what drives Kim on. He “needed to prove to his detractors in the outside world that he was no joke”; he is “operating in accordance with fulfilling his one goal in life: staying in power”. These may well be true, but his wider motivation and ideology are explained all too breezily by Fifield through the disparate lenses of Louis XVI, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Ferdinand Marcos and Mobutu Sese Seko – a wide-ranging group whose inspirational role in Kim’s psyche is hardly a given. “All students in Switzerland learned about the French Revolution … Does the Great Successor remember these lessons?”, Fifield ponders. She invokes Machiavelli repeatedly, though it’s unlikely Kim sees himself as the strategist’s heir. Ultimately, her characterization of her subject as an archetypal dictator – that is, a sociopath – speaks more to guesswork and her own frame of reference than to Kim himself. Curiously, Fifield neglects to mention any delinquency on the part of Washington in cultivating North Korea’s pariah status, pinning the blame solely on villainous Pyongyang.

Quite a different picture of Kim is revealed in Travis Jeppesen’s See You Again in Pyongyang. The jacket copy notes that the author “challenges the notion that Pyongyang is merely a ‘showcase capital’ where everything is staged for the benefit of foreigners”. Unlike Fifield, who sees the city’s prosperity as a giant marketing campaign and reward system, Jeppesen is more interested in the individual experiences of “Pyonghattanites”, which he views as authentic, in spite of the larger falsehood encasing them. This is, however, but a minor difference with Fifield compared to the way Jeppesen describes Kim: “Kim Jong Un may be a tyrant. But he is simultaneously, like all North Koreans, a victim of the system he was born into, a system that he is mostly powerless to change. Unlike his father, he was far too young to have consciously maneuvered his way into power”. Though Jeppesen is not blind to the realities of an autocracy, his account is really a collection of fleeting impressions from a flâneur, writer and art historian, and reveals as much about the author as about North Koreans. Though the book lags when veering too much into the expat literature category, the descriptions of choreographed interactions and visits to monuments do provide flashes of unexpected poignancy. At one point, in a gargantuan museum housing Kim Il-sung artefacts, the cheerful guide suddenly passes out; it is then revealed she is five months pregnant and had skipped breakfast.

Notably, Jeppesen comments on the Clinton administration’s signing of the Agreed Framework of 1994 in bad faith, never intending to follow through with its promise of building civilian nuclear reactors. “Credibility is naturally lost when you appear to be lying … By the time George W. Bush became president, this loss of credibility was aggravated by a not-so-subtle strain of outright hostility”, culminating in the infamous Axis of Evil proclamation. This view is shared by Glyn Ford in Talking to North Korea, yet another recent study that promises to “blast apart the myths”. It is the slowest book of the trio, and if Fifield focuses on the man and Jeppesen on the people, Ford sees North Korea as an international problem to be solved with diplomacy. His grasp of foreign policy relations is impressive, though his book is more useful as an insight into how others have understood North Korea over the years than as a guide to Pyongyang itself. The experience of reading it brings to mind that famous line from War and Peace: “The more we try to explain sensibly these phenomena of history, the more senseless and incomprehensible they become for us”.

Ford’s take on the murder of Kim’s half-brother Kim Jong-nam in Kuala Lumpur in 2017 was that it was carried out to prevent Beijing from installing him as a puppet; Fifield, in a rather more interesting theory, supported by an anonymous source, posits that Jong-nam “became an informant for the CIA, an agency with a track record of trying to bring down dictators it didn’t like”.

Reading one book about North Korea is enlightening. Reading more than one becomes an exercise in epistemology. But what many Western Pyongyangologists – including these ones – fail fully to appreciate, in pursuit of their single truthful narrative about Kim Jong-un, is just how deeply wedded the Korean psyche is to the idea of sovereignty. Both North and South Korea believe they share one history going back 5,000 years. In South Korea the concept of danil minjok (single ethnicity) was taught in schools as late as 2007, while the Kim dynasty’s obsession with lineage, supposedly linked to the sacred Mount Baekdu, becomes less outlandish when considered in the context of a more general preoccupation with ancestral seats across the peninsula. And this nativism played a major role in keeping Korea independent for millennia, save for thirty-five years of Japanese occupation. In this context, North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons – about which even defectors express pride – isn’t just a power ploy by a rogue state but a desperate move to protect itself from what it perceives as the very real possibility of foreign invasion. As soon as the DPRK’s sovereignty is guaranteed, Kim Jong-un will stop nuclear testing and focus on improving the country’s economy – something he declared in his address to the Workers’ Party in 2018.

This won’t mean freedom of speech any time soon, however. A credible parallel for Kim’s future isn’t to be found in Africa or Southeast Asia but in South Korea: in the form of Park Chung-hee, the dictator who is still remembered fondly for jump-starting the Miracle on the Han River. Not coincidentally, Park had also harboured nuclear ambitions, against Washington’s will, and his chief of security, who assassinated him, had connections to the CIA. It is also worth remembering that democracy arrived in South Korea only in 1993. It will probably take many decades, possibly generations, before North Korea transitions to a democratic state. For now, its leader seems interested in becoming a “well-liked” dictator by boosting the economy. This, of course, is only a theory – which is what so many “truths” about the country turn out to be.